It’s the summer holidays and for thousands of parents up and down the land, this means hearing “WHAT ARE WE DOING TODAY?” screamed in their ears at breakfast.
I have two daughters and they’re 10 and five years old.
Modern kids expect the world. Day trips. Entertainment. Activities.
Let’s rewind to the 80s. A different time and my own experience of “the summer holidays”. I often stayed with my Granny in Coventry. She was a busy woman – volunteering, cooking, and battling the patriarchy. If I’d asked her the question – “What are we doing today Gran?” she would have replied – “No idea.”
The notion that you “entertained” your kids/grandkids didn’t exist. Adults did adult things, sometimes they pushed a swing, but mainly they went to work, complained about the mess, tidied up and cooked (which is a lot already right?)
In the garden shed lived a pair of mouldy stilts that had been passed down through two generations of our Irish family.
One year, I spent an entire summer walking up and down the path on these stilts. When I got to the end of the…
